Don’t JUST DO IT !!!

06 Mar 2018#Sex Education

Don’t JUST DO IT !!!
‘We don’t need any education
Don’t need to know any birth control
Dark sarcasm of all the sex problems
No teachers &amp; so the kids are alone
All in all it's just another topic to troll’
- Gulabi Flayed
To begin with, let me congratulate my friend for creating THATMATE and thank her for asking me to write this guest article. I have penned down a few things I have to say on the relevance of the effort she is trying to put together.My friends accuse me of finding inspiration in my life from Bollywood and they are not completely off on that. I agree that many of the dialogues in movies go really overboard but some just make so much sense in a different context. Like this one ‘Aata hai Jai, Ghursawari har Ranjhore ka Rathore Maa ke pet se seekh keaata hai’. I don’t know about horse riding, but it certainly holds somewhat true when it comes to sex. The most pertinent question is how did Adam and Eve figure out the art of multiplication without divine guidance or how we Indians quadrupled our population after independence with an abysmal literacy rate of 12%.
Kamasutra is the greatest research thesis on sex and an undeniable part of our heritage, which we may not speak much about but silently take enormous pride in. Keeping all this in mind, how do my friend’s effort to sensitize the world on sex education fit in. Is she trying to teach nursery rhymes to graduates? The answer to that is simple, we know the art but not really the science behind it.
Sex education is much more comprehensive than just talking about sex. There is no doubt that sex is a pleasure, but it is a treasure to know about birth control techniques, sexually transmitted diseases (STD), sexual anatomy, right sexual habits etc. The ‘sanskar’ in our families did not really give us complete access to this wealth of knowledge when we were growing up, and such topics were always kept inside our mental closets. Let’s not pretend that we are modern enough to discuss such topics openly when in reality we are part of the problem. In Indian homes, sex-related issues do not get discussed and it is right then when google comes handy. But the internet itself is a world of its own, where one would not know which is a fact and which is an opinion. So it would be a great idea to know, share and propagate knowledge through a forum which is reliable and trustworthy. And I believe that is what THATMATE is all about, where we share because we care.
It is not unwise for someone to question how far such an effort can go. For that, I need to narrate some history of social transformation in our friendly neighborhood. In the seventies, in a small country like Bangladesh, the average children per woman used to be around six when in contrast the developed world had an average of just two. The Bangladesh government-appointed literate women in the villages who would go from door to door to spread awareness about techniques of birth control and family planning. At the same time, the government emphasized on girl’s education which helped in making girls self-reliant and delayed the average age of getting married by a few years. In a couple of decades, the country managed to halve its population growth.
Sex is not that complex and neither is knowing about it. It is an art for lovers and science for doctors, but for an enlightened soul, it is a bit of both.
Priyam Ghosh
An engineer by profession, a filmy by passion and a writer when I am forced to write :P